Review

Listening to and critiquing a score like Marco Werba's Il Conte di Melissa has the potential for
being a thankless chore: I haven't seen the film (which is as of now unreleased
in the United States) and I don't speak very good Italian (which
cripples my gleaning anything substantive from track titles). So please accept
these qualifying statements as a bit of a penance for trying to divine
something intelligent purely from the music itself. This new CD from the Hexacord
label is a self-proclaimed Limited Edition, "World Premiere Recording",
so I guess somebody somewhere has got to be pretty pumped to have this music
available. But after a few listens, this reviewer discovered very little to get
terribly excited about.

The best I can figure about the film is from the photos on Hexacord's
rather spare packaging: it seems to be a Restoration period piece, replete with
witches, tortured peasants, evil noblemen with pointy goatees, and the brunette
on the cover (Melissa, we can safely assume) tying it all together somehow.

Considering this broad canvas, Werba's music is smaller than you'd
expect. Centered around a downbeat but very capable central theme for cello
(heard everywhere, but first in "Il rogo della strega"), the score is more of a chamber piece,
backed by too many great-sounding-but-undeniably-synth elements and too few
live players to give it any real orchestral heft. The main theme pops up again
and again, as played by a handful of featured solo instrumentalists, such as
guitar, harpsichord, flute, and the requisite wordless female voice. They serve
to break the monotony for a while, but not enough to sustain a full hour of
listening. This is finely crafted music which I can imagine works well in the
film, but divorced from the screen the relentless repetition becomes
overwhelming and ultimately numbing.

As wallpaper for your booth at the renaissance fair, this stuff is
probably pure gold. But as a specific listening experience, Il Conte di Melissa starts out slow and
stubbornly stays there. Worth noting separately is the last track, a
single-style arrangement, English and Latin translation of the principal love
theme titled "Love Was Fatal To Me". Probably pretty exotic to the
folks listening in Italy (the same way any Italian opera adds
musical credibility to even the most pretentious Engligh-language films), it's
vocal styling sadly reflects an inadvertent comic tone. To put it bluntly, "is
this what we sound like when we try to sing Italian?" I sure hope not.

Postscript: Composer Marco Werba has been pretty vocal about his dissatisfaction with this review. He says the score has been getting great reviews everywhere else (which I don't doubt... it's really not as bad as he thinks I think it is). Moreover, he concluded that I am not qualified to make any judgments about his music. I was crushed.Matt Barry